An Individualist, Just Like the Rest of Us: The Performance of Hegemonic Masculinities in "The Case of Milo Radulovich"

Abstract

elizabeth marquis is an assistant professor in the Arts and Science Program and the School of the Arts at McMaster University. Her research interests include issues related to screen performance, film studies pedagogy, and the teaching and learning of creativity across disciplines, and her work has been published in such publications as the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Studies in Documentary Film, and the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. recent writing on documentary film has begun to suggest the importance of attending to the signifying work of the nonfiction performer. Building on converging lines of scholarship that emphasize the constructedness of documentary texts and the performative nature of identity, scholars such as Thomas Waugh, Leger Grindon, Vinicius do Valle Navarro, and Stella Bruzzi have argued persuasively in favor of viewing performance as a central component of nonfiction discourse. Bruzzi, for instance, underlines that documentaries are founded on the creative interaction between a filmmaker and the reality on which she or he encroaches and that they thus must be seen as “performative acts whose truth comes into being only at the moment of filming” (New Documentary 7). In this respect, Bruzzi points out that all documentaries can be characterized as performances of “reality,” effectively modifying and extending the terms of Bill Nichols’s “performative mode” (92–106) and applying these terms to the whole of nonfiction production.1 This acknowledgement that nonfiction films are themselves performative, however, also opens the door for consideration of a second brand of documentary performance—namely, the communicative work of the individuals who appear within nonfiction films and television programs. Indeed, if documentaries, as performative texts, produce the “truths” that they document, the people who populate such texts contribute significantly to this truth-production process by virtue of the ways in which they enact themselves for the camera. Alongside and in combination with other formal elements such as editing and shot composition, documentary subjects exert a considerable impact on the meanings and effects of the texts in which they figure through gesture, posture, facial expression, word choice, intonation, and the like. To this extent, Bruzzi’s claim that “performance has always been at the heart of documentary filmmaking” (New Documentary 125) is in fact doubly true. This article seeks to substantiate Bruzzi’s argument by illustrating the way in which performance contributes significantly to one commonly described function of documentary films. In particular, by looking to enactments of masculinity in the CBS News See It Now (1951– 57) episode titled “The Case of Milo Radulovich, AO589839” (1953), I will demonstrate that performance figures importantly in documentary texts’ ability to reinforce, inflect, and/or subvert hegemonic social norms. In the moments before the “The Case of Milo Radulovich, AO589839” was aired on 20 October 1953, Edward R. Murrow is said to have turned to producer Fred Friendly and warned, “[T]hings will never be the same around here after tonight” (Friendly 3–4). In line with this